I think the answer is to get creative. Which is why it’s important to create writing time, rather that just find it. If I wait to find some writing time I could sometimes wait days and days… and that’s exactly what’s happened in the past: I get a good bit of momentum going and then lose it all because I get a series of awkward shifts plus one or two social events and suddenly a whole week and a half’s gone by and wasn’t there a project I was trying to work on…?
Part of this stack’s lil’ bio is ‘creating time to create’… why? Because if you’re anything like me you find that haaard. But also because just ‘finding’ the time isn’t enough.
The writing world seems full of interviews with writers who’ll tell you they get up at 5am every day and write for three hours before the working day begins. But that doesn’t work for all of us, no matter how dedicated we want to be. And actually maybe I shouldn’t even use the word dedicated because it isn’t about not being dedicated enough, it’s about finding a way to create the space you need at the times that are best for you in your life.
I think (and I stress think here because I’ve read a bunch of things over the years that relate to this but I can no longer remember the names of them…) that it doesn’t matter if it’s 5am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm, or 10pm, what matters is the regularity. Knowing you’re gonna sit down each day at that time and write for an hour, or half an hour, or three hours, or fifteen minutes. If the routine is there you know it’s coming so you don’t stress about it at other times, and your brain knows it’s coming so it starts subconsciously preparing for writing - making it even easier to slip into the creativity because you’re primed for it.
Along somewhat similar lines here’s an interesting article by Sheryl Garratt about how you can utilise rituals and routines to tell your brain it’s time to get into creative flow.
So here’s where that gets hard. What if, like me and like a whole lot of other people, you’re solidly working class, meaning you work to someone else’s schedule, and/or you work shifts.
When do you do your best writing? You know those times when you feel clear and energised, when you sink into creativity and lose hours…
One of my biggest sadnesses has been training myself out of writing at night because of having to be at work the next day. My best times for creativity and productivity are roughly between 9:30pm and 1:30am. But I work shifts which could start at 2pm, but also could start at 8am, and I’m not getting up at 6am to be at work for 8am if I’ve been up till almost 2am.
Also, because I have night brain it wants that late night pattern and it only takes one or two days to flip straight into that schedule, then if I’ve got an early shift coming up I’m stuck struggling like hell to fall asleep in time to get enough sleep before that shift. That lost sleep makes my day super difficult and knocks on to make the rest of the week harder.
Ultimately it becomes not worth it to stay up writing till even 11pm or midnight because the creativity fires up my brain and the knock on makes my working life so difficult. So what happens? I almost never write during that key productive time.
The same problem arises if I try to regularly write in the mornings. Some days I don’t leave work till 10pm, and with the commute I don’t get home till 10:45pm, I’m not asleep then till midnight and there’s no way I’m getting up at 5am to write.
Maybe you’re reading this thinking yeah this is totally me and what the hell am I supposed to do about it? Having a routine is impossible (I don’t even have a rolling rota either so literally every single week is a different shift pattern) so do we just never benefit from being able to write regularly?
I think the answer is to get creative. Which is why it’s important to create time to write, rather that just find it. If I wait to find some writing time I could sometimes wait days and days… and that’s exactly what’s happened in the past: I get a good bit of momentum going and then lose it all because I get a series of awkward shifts plus one or two social events and suddenly a whole week and a half’s gone by and wasn’t there a project I was trying to work on…?
I think there’s a few ways you can go about this, and here’s three things I’ve been trying out this year.
Create a set of mini routines
So routine on a weekly scale is impossible. But you know the kinds of shifts you get, you know what sort of format each of your days might present. Have a think and write these down, then sit back and see what you’ve got.
For me I generally have day shifts or evening shifts. A typical day could be a 9-5, or a 10-6, and a typical evening could be a 12:30-8:30, or a 2-10. Then I have days off - sometimes one at a time, sometimes two, three, or occasionally even four at a time (yeah there are some perks to the mad rota).
Each of the days I’ve outlined above has it’s own little rhythm. I want you to have a think about the ones you’ve identified and what time you have within them that could become writing time; this is how you create yourself a set of interchangeable day-specific routines.
For example, I know that on a 2-10 evening shift if I get up at 8am I’ve got five hours before I need to leave for work and I can aim to do roughly an hour of exercise, an hour of house admin chore stuff, and an hour and a half of writing (in practice I also know that those three and a half hours will take up five because I’m bad at both time and task switching, so I don’t plan in any more than that). My routine for that day is get up and exercise, have breakfast and coffee, write for a while, then do house admin chore things and get ready for work.
This doesn’t have to be set in stone either. If you’re also like me in that you find the idea of having everything planned super boring and feel you need to have some freedom of choice, then you can create a few day-routines that you can switch up for each other. So for example if I’ve got a couple of those 2-10 days in a row then I know one of them can have the above routine and the other can have an exercise focused routine where I get up at 8, do an hour of writing, shirk the house stuff, and go climbing from 10:30-1:30. This idea of keeping your routines fresh with small amounts of change is also supported in this article by Sarah Stewart.
Having a set of day routines that correlate to my specific shift patterns enables me to plan what I’m going to do each week, to know in advance when I’m going to get writing time and where I can squeeze in extra if I want to. It means that even though I can’t devote the same time every morning or evening I can plan ahead and award my brain a little bit of that subconscious preparation time. It also means, once you’ve got those routines figured out, that you can spend way less time puzzling over where you’re gonna fit things in because you have some transferable templates you can work with (I don’t know about you but I find scheduling sooo hard, there’s always so many things I’ve genuinely entirely forgotten about, I don’t know how people manage to stay consistently organised…).
Transform the time you have
You’ll likely have heard this somewhere before… can you create writing time in spaces that aren’t traditional sit-at-your-desk-and-write places?
For me this looked like realising that when I have day shifts I could swap out my car commute for a spell on the tram. Day shifts coincide with peak traffic times, which means slooowww petrol-burning journeys. Instead of crawling along in the car I could catch the tram, which takes about 50 minutes, and after all the morning people have gotten off in the city I’ll have a seat and some quiet for the remaining 40 minutes of journey where I can catch up on some reading, or get a notebook or laptop out and write. Beautiful.
This only works on day shifts mind because when there’s almost no traffic late at night it only takes 30 minutes to drive home so I don’t wanna be sitting on a post 10pm tram for 50.
Are there any swaps or changes you could make in your life? Maybe you could write on your lunchbreak, swap a boring commute like I have, or utilise time between chores or different jobs.
Write small
This one you’ve definitely heard before… write in little bits of time.
I, like so many other people, spent years feeling that unless I could dedicate a solid three hours there was just no way I could get anything done, and wondering why the hell I kept hearing people shouting on about writing in small bursts. What on earth was the point in even bothering to get your notebook out if you only had ten minutes, or twenty; the time would be gone by the time you’d wrestled your kit out and your mind into gear.
Friends, I decided to give the writing in small bursts thing a real go this year and omfg it works. I am consistently amazed at how quickly my brain switches gear, how much I get done in those mini sessions, and how quickly those mini sessions start adding up to quantities of writing. Because the days keep coming whether you’ve done any writing or not and if you’ve got twenty days of one paragraph a day that’s twenty paragraphs, or twenty poem drafts or ideas you might be able to use in something else, or twenty edit sessions taking place when you were in twenty different frames of mind.
Then when you do get those big, beautiful chunks of time you’ve got loads to work with.
Of course there’ll be the days you sit down for your ten minutes and barely come out with anything, and there’ll be days when you get sucked in and it damn well hurts prying yourself away after only ten minutes… but let’s face it, those two things also occur in longer sessions right.
So what little pockets of time can you create for writing? Maybe you can get to work fifteen minutes early and write in the staff room, or while you’re waiting for your kid at a club, or for a doctors appointment, or a train. Start looking for those little spaces in between the activities in your life and I bet you’ll be able to find a few, then start keeping a notebook handy or get into the habit of using your notes app for writing.
Alrighty, those are my three pieces of advice for creating time to create when you have a super all-over-the-place schedule like I do. I’d love to hear what you think of them, and especially how you get on if you try them - particularly the first as that’s my own lil’ tactic. Please let me know in the comments.
Also let me know if you have, or know of, any other super tips for creating writing time in routine-resistant lives!
As always thanks so much for reading my words and I hope you found them useful and at least a little bit interesting.
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